It’s Sunday morning and sun the color
of honey spills on the kitchen counter;
it’s ten or eleven o’clock and they
fill our kitchen, our son and his new wife
and their friends and the laughing, the way that
people laugh when laughing is like breathing,
laughing about beer and golf and bad luck
and graduate school, laughing at jobs they’ve
had or never had, the two wives rolling
eyes, laughing, planning Sunday. His new wife
humming as if she were baking or were
planning something really nice like golfing
while you test your clubs in the living room
where I sort my photos. In the night you
woke me to tell me again that you were
sorry, breathing sorry in the gray light,
holding my hand until our fingers slid
apart and then you asked me to walk out
on the grass wet from the rain sluicing all
night, asked me to look at the dawn sun, the
way it slipped up round and impenitent
and shed the red horizon and sliced the
sky and didn’t have to be worth the dark.